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True story: during IndieCade, I walked past Ouya’s tent, and a good 50 percent of it was taken up by massive TowerFall stations. They were facing out of the tent, obscuring the remainder of the tarnished wondercube’s lineup like some massive fun planet eclipsing a dying sun. The metaphor for the state of the platform, as you can probably tell from that simile, was palpable. But it’s OK because everything’s still amazing on PC, and we’re getting the biggest, best version TowerFall has to offer (along with PS4 or whatever I guess). TowerFall Ascension will offer a new co-op quest mode, 50 new levels, and countless new items. Sorry Ouya. Maybe don’t try to prevent huge audiences of people from playing games next time. Karma and all that.

(Admittedly, Ascension is coming to Ouya too – just three months after PC and PS4 for reasons.)

So yes, it’s the same game of human pincushion you knew and longed for from afar, but with a whole, whole lot more stuff. That said, one fairly major feature is still missing: online play. Maybe that’ll change down the line, but right now creator Matt Thorson doesn’t seem too in love with the idea.

“There won’t be any online at launch, sorry,” he tweeted. “It’s really meant to be played together with friends.”

Shame that, but it’s understandable. TowerFall is stupidly fun when played with friends/enemies/rival street gangs, and online would take away from some of the person-to-person purity of it.

TowerFall Ascension will rise from Ouya’s ashes in early 2014. Who’s got it in their crosshairs (which they’ve affixed to a bow-and-arrow for some reason)?

16 Comments

I’ll never get tired of reading the comfy couch justification for a missing online mode. Sure, it may be better if your friend is in the same room but some of us don’t have that kind of opportunity anymore.

Whereas I hate playing with strangers, and never use online co-op for my games. That being said, I totally get where you’re coming from. Which is why options should be the standard, rather than online-only or couch-only. Let us do both!

But online isn’t just for playing with strangers. Some of us have ended up in different states (or even countries) from the friends we’d like to be playing games with… or sometimes it’s just snowing or raining out and people want to get together to play a game without coming over.

My problem is that I don’t have two controllers (well, I do, but one of them is an off-brand USB PS2 controller that doesn’t sit well with most modern games) and I don’t have a couch in front of my PC so one of us has to sit in the uncomfortable office chair (usually me because I am a good host). Also I have no friends because I am an unlikeable arsehole.

Adding local co-op is a lot less work than adding online co-op. For most games it would mean having to re-write huge parts of the coding, so basically devs will almost never add online multiplayer if they hadn’t planned on it from the start.

That’s the main reason. Adding local coop, it’s usually just another agent in your scene, controlled by another controller. Nothing you haven’t done already, in theory, in your game.

Adding online requires knowledge of network coding, techniques to handle lag, lost packets… you can’t just repeat the scene from far, you need to find an efficient way to synchronize both… A lot of factors, and a different skillset than the one required by making the rest of the game to begin with.

And that is, if you planned it to begin with. If you didn’t, then you might as well rewrite a large part of your engine, because you won’t be able to add it efficiently at this point. And since they planned to be a couch brawler for a console in the first place, it’s likely this wasn’t the case.

It’s pretty stupid to harp on Ouya because they’re trying to secure exclusive titles… you know, like every console out there. I’ve never seen an equivalent agressive denunciation of Playstation/Wii/Xbox exclusives on RPS.

Ouya has enough defects and problems as it is, they should be enough material to criticize it without making some new ones up.

Thing is, if you’re trying to position your console as an open alternative to the big players, you don’t emulate the worst parts of what the big players do. Which is precisely what Ouya have been doing with their rush to secure exclusives.

That they’re asking for longer exclusivity periods than the big players too. Well now.